By Kamal Choudhury and Blake Brittain
March 3 (Reuters) – Moderna has agreed to pay Genevant Sciences, a subsidiary of Roivant Sciences, and Arbutus Biopharma up to $2.25 billion to settle a long-running legal fight over the technology that made its COVID-19 vaccine possible, the companies said on Tuesday.
Under the deal, Moderna will pay $950 million upfront in July 2026, with an additional $1.3 billion that depends on the outcome of a separate legal appeal.
The deal resolves all U.S. and international legal actions accusing Moderna of using lipid nanoparticle, or LNP, a delivery technology owned by Genevant and Arbutus, without permission in its COVID vaccine. Moderna said in a press release that it would not owe the companies any royalties for LNP technology in its future vaccines under the agreement.
Lipid nanoparticles act as a tiny protective shell that helps fragile mRNA molecules reach human cells intact, allowing the vaccine to work as intended.
Moderna shares jumped more than 10% in after-hours trading, while Arbutus rose 11% and Roivant was up about 1%.
The settlement “removes the worst-case scenario” of potentially double-digit royalty rates, said Jefferies analyst Andrew Tsai, adding that it also eliminates any future royalty risk for Moderna’s upcoming COVID and COVID/flu combo vaccines.
The deal is positive for Moderna because the total payment works out to a very small share of the company’s roughly $48 billion in past global vaccine sales, matching Moderna’s earlier expectations, said Tsai.
Moderna had been set to defend against Genevant and Arbutus’ patent infringement allegations at a trial in Delaware federal court starting next week.
The case would have been the first to go to trial from a web of high-stakes U.S. patent lawsuits over COVID vaccine technology that has also ensnared Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech as well as other drugmakers.
Genevant and Arbutus filed a similar lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech over the LNP technology in their vaccine in 2023. That lawsuit is still ongoing.
Moderna has separately sued rivals Pfizer and BioNTech for infringing patents related to mRNA technology. BioNTech countersued Moderna in February, arguing Moderna’s next-generation COVID-19 shot, MNEXSPIKE, infringes one of its patents.
Companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals have also filed patent lawsuits seeking shares of the tens of billions of dollars in COVID vaccine sales.
(Reporting by Kamal Choudhury in Bengaluru and Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Alan Barona and Bill Berkrot)
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